Bash Script to find the most recently modified file

Question

Hi,

I have two folders, for arguments sake /Volumes/A and /Volumes/B. They are mounted network shares from a Windows server containing a load of .bkf files from Backup Exec.

I am looking for a script which will look into both folders and find the most recently modified .bkf file and copy it to another location. There are other files in the folders which must be ignored.

Thanks in advance!!

Shaun

Edit:

I knocked this together:

cp ls -alt /Volumes/E /Volumes/F| grep bkf | head -n 1 | awk '{print $8}' /Volumes/$xservedisk/Windows/

Can anyone think of any reasons why I shouldnt use it?

Thanks again Shaun

Answer 1

NEWEST=
for f in /Volumes/A/*.bkf /Volumes/B/*.bkf
do
    if [ -z "$NEWEST" ]
    then 
        NEWEST=$f
    elif [ "$f" -nt "$NEWEST" ] 
    then
        NEWEST=$f
    fi
done

Answer 2

Use dir /O /B *.bkf in each directory. The topmost file will be the newest. the '/B' makes the list bare, just filenames. No looping required.

Answer 3

Finding files is done with: find /Volumes/[AB] -name '*.bkf'

Sorting files by modification time is done with: ls -t

if load of files is not that much, you can simply use:

ls -lrt `find /Volumes/[AB] -name '*.bkf'`

The last displayed file is the most recently modified.

edit

A more robust solution (thanks ephemient) is:

find /Volumes/[AB] -type f -name '*.bkf' -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lrt

Answer 4

Goes through some twists just to make sure to handle filenames with odd characters well, which mouviciel's doesn't:

NEWEST=$(find /Volumes/A /Volumes/B -name '*.bkf' -printf '%T@ %p\0' | \
    sort -rnz | xargs -0n1 2>/dev/null | head -n1 | cut -d' ' -f2-)
[[ -n "$NEWEST" ]] && cp -v "$NEWEST" /other-location

Actually, since these files are coming from Windows and are thus pretty much guaranteed not to have odd characters in their names (like embedded newlines),

NEWEST=$(find /Volumes/A /Volumes/B -name '*.bkf' -printf '%T@ %p\n' | \
    sort -rn | head -n1 | cut -d' ' -f2-)
[[ -n "$NEWEST" ]] && cp -v "$NEWEST" /other-location

Answer 5

cp `find /Volumes/[AB] -name '*bkf' -type f -printf "%A@\t%p\n" |sort -nr |head -1 |cut -f2` dst_directory/